In the early 1990’s, I was out of college and living with my parents in Lexington, Kentucky. I had some free time between working with a plumber and at Blockbuster Video, so I sat down to write a story. At the time, my only understanding of technology was what I had gathered from Star Trek and other sci-fi shows as well as tinkering with a 486 computer and Windows 3.1. As I would hand-write the pages, I would send them via snail-mail to my good friend, Tim, for his take on what I was writing. Over the next couple of months, I had knocked out about 56 pages. It was over the next year or so that I really didn’t do anything with it other than talk about someday finishing it. I had my sister type many of the pages for me so that they were readable.
When I was working as a cartographer in St. Pete, I gave the typed pages to a co-worker who really enjoyed the premise of the story and did a sketch drawing of his impressions. (see pics below) In 1994, I attended Clearwater Christian College. I was in Dr. MacFarlane’s Lit class, I believe in the second semester. I asked her if she would take a look at what I had written given that I was in a literature class. I remember to this day what she told me. She said that I had a wild imagination and that my grammar and sentence structures were horrible. I respected her opinion and agreed with it. Some time later, my brother Tim, gave some of my material to either a co-worker or friend of his to read. He also liked the premise of the book and he did his own renderings of what he thought the scenes looked like. (see pics below)
Fast-forward to December, 2015 – February, 2016. I decided to pick up the book once again and start retyping my typed pages (document format was incompatible with any newer word processor) as well as the remaining hand-written ones. Once I started typing, I saw how many things needed to be changed, not just the sentence structure, punctuation, grammar, etc. but also the technology. Since I had been working at the college as IT Director for almost 19 years, I noticed how many of the things I had written were dated. I decided against a total rewrite in favor of keeping and revising some of the old along with adding some new. Over the next few months, I wrote the remainder of the story using Google Docs (so I could share and collaborate). I stayed up late into the night writing 500-1000 words most nights. Once I had finished the story, I went back to revise, quickly finding many things that needed to be fixed. Once I was done, my daughter was the first to read the story. Soon after, my friend Tim, his wife, and my wife all read the story (I read it to my 9 year-old son for his input as well). Each took time out of their busy schedules to help me edit what seemed to be an endless sea of errors, logic fails, and so on. My friend even came down to spend an entire day helping me with it. A little while later, I asked a friend and one of the English professors from CCC to do a full edit for me. Let me just say that she’s amazing! If you’re writing and need someone to edit for you, I recommend paying her to do it for you. The recommendations that she gave were extremely helpful. She even wrote the blurb.
Finding a book cover is no small task. I searched far and wide to get just the right mix that I was looking for. I finally happened upon a graphics designer from Germany who took my cover to task and did a wonderful job. I highly recommend her. Finally, my good friend Ken was an enormous help to me. He and his wife are best selling Christian book authors who really know their stuff. I cannot thank Ken enough for his help and encouragement.
In December, I finished Pertak: Duplicity as a sequel to the original. This is number two in the trilogy. Stay Tuned! I write as I have time so it may be several months before you see the third in the series. Thanks to all of you who have purchased Pertak and Pertak: Duplicity as well as those who have finished reading this post. God bless!
